“See? Magic.”
Not until later, when they were almost asleep, his body spooned around hers, did he ask if she wanted to tell him. She did want to. “I can’t.”
“Why?”
She dug a condom from his nightstand. She didn’t want to talk. She wanted the absence that entered her whenever he did.
The next day, she wrote Daniel a cowardly email. It said thank you for loving me, it said I’m sorry, it said I can’t, it said goodbye. It said nothing about meeting someone else, because real Alice had not.
* * *
I am no one, she thought when she was with him. I am whatever stories I choose to tell. Is this what you wanted, she thought, a question for both her mothers, is this what you ran toward?
And it was so easy, like submitting to gravity: he did not expect, he did not demand, he did not need, he did not care. He did not see, or fail to see. To name a thing—Alice dimly remembered from the stories she used to read, all those wizards and wishes and magic—was to define it. And this was why the prudent person kept her name a secret.
Who are you: no need to answer if you could avoid anyone who might bother to ask.
She invented details of her imagined self as needed: the residential motel in Columbus, the seedy apartment complex outside Detroit, her mother’s bad boyfriend, her own bad boyfriends. She stole her aunt Debra’s story for her own, invented a best friend who’d OD’d in front of her, described the girl’s glassy stare, her seizures and drool, told him this was why she’d gotten sober, at least the first time. She conjured herself into Wendy Doe, into her mother before she was a mother, when she was just a girl who hated herself so much she willed it gone. She decided perhaps this was better than chasing nonexistent answers. Instead of finding her mother, Alice would become her.
He still called her Anonymous. She let him photograph her, body part by body part, leg ear hand nipple cunt. She learned to like it, to touch herself under the lens’s gaze, to believe what it told her, that from the right angle, she could be beautiful. He agreed never to aim it at her face.
Zach taught her how to use his camera, urged her to take her own pictures, but she always found herself paralyzed once the thing was in her hands. In his hands, the camera captured everything: dying neon, rotting fruit, a woman’s thigh, an old man shuffling down a grocery store aisle, brass knuckles in a weedy gutter, mundane made to matter simply because someone aimed a lens and argued it should. Alice had always only taken pictures of people and places she loved, or was publicly trying to. She was a born yearbook editor, a believer in the pixelated past. The story, she’d always thought, was in the photo feed, array, collage, the carefully cultivated selves flattened into their idealized two dimensions. Then her mother vanished, and the photos left behind all felt like lies. Alice felt the same looking at pictures of herself: some girl she didn’t know, a stranger pretending otherwise. Zach said photography was as much about the photographer as the subject, each photo a distillation of self, and maybe this was why Alice kept refusing. She didn’t want him to know that her distilled self was vapor, that when she looked through the camera there was nothing special to see, because there was no one special to look.
“Tell me what you want,” he would say to her in the dark, his body at her service. She could not. She did not know how to say that she wanted him to decide for her, wanted her body forced to his whims, did not know if she was even allowed to want this. He took her silence as evidence she did not want at all, or not as much as she should have, as much as he did, would not say this, knew better than to ask what was wrong with her, but she could track his mounting frustration, came to anticipate the point when he would give up, shove her roughly where he needed her to be. So she got some approximation of what she wanted after all. He had stopped going to AA meetings—you’re my meeting, he told her, the only Anonymous I need—and he’d started drinking again, just casually, just occasionally, never “problematically,” except that one time she’d met his father and, according to Zach, his father’s eyes had prowled hungrily over her skin, his father’s hands had not-so-accidentally grazed her ass, her cleavage. His father had done what father does best, psychically marked his claim on her body and was probably even now jerking off to her undressed image. Zach’s narration ended prematurely when he rammed his fist through the drywall. She bandaged his hand; he cried; she put him to bed. He said that was his last drink, again. He kissed her fingers, curled his body around her, said, you’re bad for me, as if she had wrought his destruction, and she felt guilty, as if she had. Also, shamefully, proud, powerful, wholly unlike herself, and that night she’d climbed on top of him in the dark, stayed on top, as she’d never brought herself to do before, swallowed the pain of his grip on her waist, found finger-shaped bruises in the morning, and pressed them, hard, so her body could remember.
* * *
Zach wanted her to apply for a job at his coffee shop. You need a job, he said. You can’t stay in the old lady’s attic forever. He assumed the widow was old, the manse Brontëan decrepit, and she let him. He told her barista was the best kind of job, mindless, that the concept of loving your job was a capitalist scheme to lull the worker into submission. Alice had never imagined loving a job. Her capitalist urges were pure.
Sometimes she would meet him at the café to wait out his shift. She liked sampling the elaborate coffee drinks with whipped cream and flavored syrups. Sometimes he drew her dirty pictures in the foam. That day, he drew a heart. He was getting sweeter, and she found this problematic. It had been easier to lie about herself when he was a stranger, but she couldn’t exactly reintroduce herself now that he’d started to care. He was starting to care. She could feel it when he kissed her, when he tucked a strand of hair behind her ears, like he was enacting the playbook he’d learned from a movie: this is how you tenderly handle a woman you love. She couldn’t let him love her, not when he barely knew her. She certainly couldn’t let herself come to care about him—that was the opposite of the point.
When his shift ended, they walked through the city while he aimed his camera at everything he saw. Buildings, shopkeepers—never homeless people, he said, because that would be tacky—but everything else was fair game. His eye was always roving. She used to resent this, assume he couldn’t be listening with his eye pressed to the viewfinder, scanning the world for a more interesting focus, but she’d come to understand what he meant when she first met him, that this was his way of seeing. And he was so strangely determined to see. Sometimes in this city, dirt and rats and bodies, she wished she could walk with her eyes closed.
As they walked, Zach ranted, angry at his mother for putting up with his father, angry at his father for everything. It was his favorite topic. She told him she was sorry, as she always did, and was.
“You’re always sorry, never angry,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“When you talk about your mother. You make her sound like… never mind.”
He still thought her mother was a drug-addled mess who had hung herself. She told him to stop hedging.
“You make her sound like total shit, okay? Your father’s a ghost. She was all you had, and she abandoned you.”
“She died.” Alice hated herself for saying it. She could have turned herself into anyone—why had she chosen to be the kind of liar who would make up such a treacherous lie? “It’s different.”
“Is it? I mean, obviously it is, I’m sorry, I just—if I were you, I’d be fucking angry.”
They kept walking. She was looking down, but could tell he’d lowered his camera, was looking at her. She was angry now, at him. The whole point of a him was to allow herself to go unseen.
“I choose not to be angry at her,” she said.
“It’s that easy? You choose not to be, and you’re just… not?”
“Why are you pushing this?”
It was the closest they’d come to a fight, and she didn’t like it. You didn’t fight with people unless you cared about them.
You didn’t answer uncomfortable questions about your dead parents, even when they were fictional. You didn’t start asking yourself forbidden questions just because a stranger dared you to. That’s all he was, she reminded herself, a stranger. She only knew the version of him that knew this fake version of Alice, so how could he be anyone else?
“Whenever you talk about her, you just don’t seem, I don’t know… like yourself. It’s like you’re holding back.”
“You know me so well now?”
“I thought I did,” he said. “I want to. I tell you about my shit.”
“Did I ask you to?”
“Fuck you,” he said. Then, “That came out sounding worse than it did in my head.”
“Whatever.”
“Why are you being this way?” he said.
“What, unlike me?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Maybe you have no fucking idea who I am.” Alice still wouldn’t look at him, but she heard the soft click of his camera’s shutter. She felt the urge to rip it from his hands and smash it against the cement. “I have to go.”
“What, now? Here? Let me at least—”
“I have to go,” she said again, and when she turned and walked off in the opposite direction, she assumed he would not follow her, but she didn’t turn around to make sure.
* * *
She walked aimlessly. She checked her phone, wondering why Zach hadn’t texted her, asking her to come back, asking where she’d gone. When he did text, she ignored it. She wanted to call Daniel, but Daniel was done. Daniel had let a drunk skank sext Alice a shot of Daniel’s hands and lips all over drunk skank boob. She did not want to think these words, but they beat their insistent tattoo. Drunk skank. Daniel, when Alice called at 3 a.m. to ask what the fuck, had told her not to say those words, defended drunk skank, she was his friend, he said, unlike certain skanks who will remain nameless. He was drunk, too—too drunk to have drunk-dialed Alice. Daniel was responsible even in the sloshed depths of irresponsibility. You think I don’t get angry, because I don’t vent it at you like a fucking child, Daniel said. You think I don’t have needs, because I can acknowledge yours? Fuck you, she’d said, and he said, You missed your window of opportunity on that.
She walked, and she missed being known as much as she missed being unknown, and eventually she called her father. She missed her father.
“I miss you, too,” he said. She asked how he was, and he told her about the dinner he’d had with the neighbors, the chili he’d cooked. He didn’t ask her anything.
When she was younger, still young enough to want to tell the story of her day, her mother was the one she’d told. Her mother would fire back detailed follow-up questions, as if she actually cared who’d cheated herself into an extra turn at four square or whether the clique of girls who referred to themselves proudly as the clique had devoured another one of its own. She remembered everyone’s name and each of Alice’s complaints; she adopted Alice’s grudges and, on the rare nights Alice allowed herself to admit weakness, she would promise that while life would never get easier, Alice would get better and better at handling hard. Alice’s father was usually absent for these conversations. When he was there, he rarely participated, never remembered the details.
He’d asked her no questions about college, and—other than the general and persistent question of why the hell she wouldn’t just forget this whole foray into the past and move on—no questions about her time in Philadelphia. Not that he left any ambiguity about his position.
“I’m worried about you, honey. I don’t think it’s healthy, you being there.”
“I’m not Mom. I’m not going to lose it.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
A silence. “Can I ask you something? Something you don’t want me to ask?” she said.
“That doesn’t sound great.”
“I know you don’t want to talk about this, but… what was Mom like? When she got her memory back and came home. Did she remember anything?”
“I told you, she didn’t.”
“But did she seem, I don’t know, was she happy? Was she upset?”
“She was your mom.” Her father sighed. “You want to know how she was when she came back? The same as she was when she left, but more so. The anxiety—it was always bad, I knew that even at the beginning, but this, it was confirmation of everything she feared.”
“What do you mean? What was she afraid of?”
“After Ethan, after Debra—when you lose people the way she did, you know how easily things can fall apart.”
When you lose. Alice had never noticed before, the judgment embedded in syntax. One sister had—passive voice—been lost. The other sister had lost her.
“Your mom felt like she was the only thing keeping her world together. That if she let down her guard for one second, everything would collapse. She took the fugue as evidence she was right. It’s why we wanted to put it behind us. As I really wish you would.”
“That sucks,” Alice said. “But I don’t see what it has to do with me being here.”
“Alice…” He paused. “Do you want to know the story of what happened to your aunt Debra? The whole story?”
“I thought I did.”
In the version she had always heard, her mother was sent to Philadelphia to bring her baby sister home. She’d found Debra staying at an artists’ squat on South Street, some fire hazard of a warehouse scattered with sleeping bags and blowtorches. There was a party, baby sis had gotten high, gotten screwed. All of this, he confirmed, was true, but it elided some salient details.
“They had a fight. During the party. It was supposed to be a secret that Debra was here. When Debra found out that your mom had told her parents, that your mom was there to drag her home? Well, you know sisters,” he said, though Alice did not. He said Debra exploded, called her sister a traitor, a lapdog, happy to do their parents’ bidding because she was too frightened to live her own life. Debra called her sister pathetic. She called her embarrassing. “You have to understand, Alice—your mom did everything for Debra. Taking care of her, defending her to your grandparents, trying to keep her happy, when by all accounts she was a person determined to be miserable. So when Debra said that…”
When Debra said that, her sister lost it. Because you know sisters. A strange man, one of the other squatters, offered Karen a drink, and Karen decided to prove her sister wrong. It wasn’t yet a habit, imagining herself into someone new, but she was a natural. She took the drink. She took his hand, let him lead her deeper into the warehouse, away from Debra who could, for once, take care of herself.
“That’s when it happened. The OD. By the time your mother came back, it was over.”
“I don’t understand, who was the guy?”
“Nobody, that’s the point. The point is, what happened, it didn’t just happen. Your mother let it happen, because she decided she could be reckless, just this once. She blamed herself.”
“So which sister am I supposed to be here? The spoiled one who ruined everything because she didn’t want to be rescued? Or the responsible one who ruined everything by being irresponsible for the first time in her whole life?”
“That’s up to you.”
The mistake, Alice thought, wasn’t her mother’s one bad choice, but the choice she’d made every day after, to impose logical causality on bad luck, to believe in crime and its punishment, to blame herself—and it was her father’s choice to let her do so.
“What are you so afraid is going to happen to me here?” Alice asked.
“I’m afraid of everything, Alice. I’m afraid every minute of every day that something will hurt you. That’s what it means to really love someone.”
She didn’t want to be loved like that.
He told her to remember that “Wendy Doe” was a symptom. Her mother was her mother, and nothing she found out here could change that. She told him she loved him, then they hung up.
S
he walked. She gave herself permission, just for the day, to imagine that her mother had returned again, was hiding in the pedestrian swarm of Rittenhouse Square or passed out on a cardboard flat on Broad Street. She stopped veering around homeless bodies without seeing them. She forced herself to see them. Just the women at first, middle-aged bodies burritoed in sleeping bags or pushing can-heaped carts; then all of them: the emaciated teens shilling for a smoke outside the methadone clinic, the man her father’s age whose dog had more teeth than its owner, the women not much older than her, their dirt-faced children. The skyline sparkled; the city asked you to look up. Alice looked down. None of the faces were her mother’s. She walked, aimlessly at first, and then with purpose.
It was like walking through the database of unclaimed persons, and Alice knew: if her mother was lost somewhere, it was somewhere like this. If she were a loving daughter, a dutiful daughter who believed in her mother’s ongoing existence as much as she claimed, then wouldn’t she devote her life to this search, wandering the country block by miserable block, studying faces until she found the one that meant home? The other option: abandon her mother to chance, abandon herself to a forever of not knowing, and when she let herself imagine this, she could understand why her father had expended so much faith on death.
She walked to South Street, site of her mother’s supposed original sin. The neighborhood was nothing like she’d imagined. There were no artists’ squats, no rebels, no heroin chic, only a cheesy tourist imitation of bohemia—overpriced clothing stores, shiny condo complexes, a coffee shop that sold rock-star-themed cupcakes. It was all a Disney vision of adolescent rebellion, and Alice couldn’t help but feel it suited her. She could never be anything more than a fake rebel. She wandered the blocks. Anything grubby and tragic had long since been sandblasted away. The only trace left here of either sister was Alice.
ELIZABETH
Mother Daughter Widow Wife Page 24
